On the dimension of Harer's spine for the decorated Teichmüller space

Abstract

In \cite{Ha86} Harer explicitly constructed a spine for the decorated Teichmüller space of orientable surfaces with at least one puncture and negative Euler characteristic. In this paper we point out some instances where his computation of the dimension of this spine is off by $1$ and give the correct dimension.

10 pages, 4 figures